My Father, the Potato Chip

By the late fifties, television, not even a decade old, gave the low comedians who had dominated popular entertainment in the first half of the century a new economic lease on life. Buster Keaton advertised Alka-Seltzer, Groucho Marx pitched DeSoto automobiles, and my father, Bert Lahr, made a market for Lay’s Potato Chips in an ad campaign that became so popular that it branded him along with the product.

It was a surreal experience to a man whose heralded career spanned fifty years in show business, from burlesque to Ziegfeld Follies to Broadway to the legitimate stage, and finally, thanks to Frito-Lay, to packaging.

In the top floor of our West Side duplex, we had a back hallway lined with cartons of Blatz Beer, another of Dad’s earners, and the potato chips, which were made with old-fashioned salt, not the “15 micron salt” that John Seabrook writes about in this week’s magazine. In “Notes on a Cowardly Lion,” my 1969 memoir of Dad’s life and career, I recount one confusing moment when the old star came into contact with the new realities of the TV age. After a movie première of “Cast A Giant Shadow,” a young girl spotted Dad and pointed him out to her mother. “Look, Mommy—there’s the potato chip,” she said loudly. Dad looked at her, lowered his head, and pushed through the crowd.

Never mind that Cole Porter had written shows for him, that he’d been the Cowardly Lion in the “Wizard of Oz” and Estragon in the first American production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”: all these great performances were crowded out of the public imagination by the imperialism of the small screen owned at that point by nearly nine out of ten American households. To the new generation, Dad’s fame didn’t come from his exploits as a comedian onstage, but from his visibility as a guy saying, “Betcha can’t eat just one.” He was a sound bite and a potato chip.

Dad didn’t complain; in fact, he was proud of the campaign. But the new medium ate up careers the way it did comic material. The impact was confounding. As he would have said, in his signature caterwauling of bewilderment, “Gnong, gnong, gnong!”